Best Monitor to purchase?

[marty2010]

I need some suggestions for my next computer purchase.
I currently have a Viewsonic 21" G220fb (crt) and a NVIDIA 9500GT/1GB card.

Best Monitor to purchase?
CRT or LCD?
Size?
Type of monitor card and its on board memory?

[df]

1gb of memory on a video card is probably more than sufficient for Vista, PSP, movies, and most gaming. Unless you found it really lacking for some reason I'd say it's just fine for probably a few years, but that remains to be seen.

CRT monitors are not made anymore as far as I know.

What's the best LCD? I don't know, I'm too much of a cheapskate to find out but a few things you want to check the specs on are viewing angle (the greater the better) and contrast(1:10,000 or better). Getting one that has a response rate in the 5ms range or less is good too if you're going to be doing a lot of 3D rendering or movies.
Most LCDs made these days meet most peoples requirements but that doesn't mean it will meet everyone's.

I'd check reviews and online ratings systems. Finding someone at an electronics store that really does know what they are talking about can be invaluable.

Good luck.

P.S. I have the Acer X203h 20 inch LCD monitor. It was perfect up until the point that I wanted to use it in a dual computer setup with a KVM switch. Finding a switch with a DVI input/output was a pain (at the time) and using the sVGA plug meant the video card didn't want to use the full capabilities of the monitor. This was as much the video cards fault as it was the monitor or KVM though.

[Ken Berry]

I have two 24 inch full high definition (1920 x 1080) monitors, a BenQ (with HDMI connection) and an Acer. But the BenQ is definitely the better of the two in terms of colour and contrast. But the price of these has fallen to (well) below $300 these days. So I would go for the best you can afford, while making sure you get full high def resolution. This makes it better for watching high def movies, and for full screen high def TV...

[ronzie]

Use a dual monitor setup:

1. Everyday and gaming use if needed.
2. Photo Editing

The reason I say this is because the characteristics that give a good tonal (think gray scale) rendition cause more lag than typical consumer types in dealing with the dynamic contrast and black compression used to hide LCD trailing in consumer monitors. This has to do with the type of LCD panel used in the monitor.

Have a look at this LCD panel characteristic table in this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCD_monitor

I have a NEC P221W which has an S-PVA panel that looks good. It contains in its hardware a lookup table that is used for color calibration as opposed to doing it in the video card driver software. This is not a 16x9 aspect ratio but is I think 14x9 but still high resolution. You can buy it with a colorimeter/software package called Spectraview which uses a wide gamut instrument based on a dedicated X-Rite Eye-1. You can also calibrate with other colorimeters or photospectrometers that task advantage of the communications of a capable graphics card and the NEC. (After acquiring the NEC with all of the calibration equipment I had to purchase later a photospectrometer that contains its own illumination to create printer profiles. I have the graphics card set to a 4x3 aspect ratio high resolution so I do not get stretching using applications based on 4x3 monitors. The NEC has the most vertical and horizontal display dimensions of all the 22 inch diagonals I checked at about 11.6 vertical display area. To get that on many others you have to got to a 23 or 24 inch diagonal.

You might find this interesting as some comparative monitor platform issues are included:
http://www.necdisplay.com/supportcenter ... view2/faq/

The product series link is:
http://www.necdisplay.com/Products/Seri ... 3e8b085ed7

At the very least you might want an advanced IPS type panel model. It can have some black compression but creating a color profile for it (if not available) should resolve that issue. When I replace my day-to-day Viewsonic PF790 CRT I'm looking at their model 2365 as I recall, a 16x9 high def S-IPS panel model.

Whatever you get, be sure dynamic contrast is disabled for editing (and calibrating). You want constant monitor characteristics when you edit.

[bigfatron]

Best to go for IPS or PVA LCDs for graphics work as you don't get the viewing angle issues that alot of TN panels have.

[Tim Morrison]

I completely agree with "bigfatron"... get a monitor that uses an IPS or PVA panel. Well over 90% of monitors use TN (Twisted Nematic) panels, which aren't really good enough, so you will need to do a bit of searching.

[ronzie]

For the Viewsonic lineup the panel type is noted in the special features column on some of their products in this slightly outdated guide:
http://www.viewsonic.com/assets/009/5864.pdf

Note the slightly increased trailing in the IPS based VP professional series. This is a compromise you put up with in typical monitors for the digital darkroom with a good near black level curve and wider viewing angle.